Alpha & Omega
by Jukebox Hound
Summary: Even in a world of vampires and shapeshifters, of black magic and transient physics, the five Gundam pilots were unusual. 1x2x3x4x5.
1. Alpha & Omega

**Alpha & Omega  
**_**Hades' Phoenix**_

Even in a world of vampires and shapeshifters, of black magic and transient physics, the five Gundam pilots were unusual...and it had nothing to do with being the Sphere's most notorious terrorists by fifteen years of age. It was because of something much more primal, unconscious, and ultimately complex than mere social convention.

"I want you to infiltrate a prostitute ring on L2-X0843. There's evidence suggesting that it's being funded with blood-money from the war. Romefeller, specifically."

"An aristocrat who decided to invest in carnal sin after the first investment failed?" Maxwell quipped, lounging boneless in the chair before Une's desk. Chang, sitting with perfect posture beside the other pilot, made a quiet noise of disgust at the comment, and Une silently agreed.

"After I had Yuy start tracking down the old accounts, his security net caught suspicious numbers being filtered through several banks, including ones in Sweden and the Cayman Islands. He ran them and found that the accounts were under phony names. A few of them were aliases recycled from dead Romefeller officers."

Maxwell huffed. "That doesn't make sense. Why use known aliases from the war?"

"Overconfidence," Winner spoke up from zero-two's other side. "Or laziness. Proven aliases already have the necessary background to fool most systems. If the ringleaders really are associated with Romefeller, they'd already have access to phantoms that would cut down on the middlemen as well."

Une sat back in her seat to watch the interaction of the pilots. Three were sitting in chairs directly in front of her desk while Barton and Yuy had both taken up positions on either side of the door, subtly indicating that they had their comrades' backs covered. All five held themselves with confidence in their own way; all five maintained a certain amount of personal space and awareness; all five were extraordinarily dangerous, with both weapon and wit. With her expert eye she'd already counted a total of seven semiautomatic handguns and two knives up Maxwell's sleeve, but she had absolutely no doubt that she was only seeing what they allowed her to.

And yet, despite the self-assurance, despite their independence, there was also no doubt that these five alphas were as tightly knit as any other pack.

"Idiots," Chang muttered, eyes flashing with reptilian anger at people's unfailing stupidity. Maxwell snorted, waving a dismissive hand that trailed wisps of shadow in the air.

"So, what's the plan, boys?"

"I'll track down the source of the transactions," Yuy spoke up, "and narrow down our list of suspects. We shouldn't go in until we know who's guilty of selling more than just sex."

"I'll go in as a customer once you've done that and see how far I can get in," Barton added quietly. Neither he nor Yuy were given much to conversation, but observing how muscle shifted beneath his clothes Une knew it wasn't for lack of self-confidence. Preternaturally sharpened teeth flashed briefly in the light of the office as they spoke.

Maxwell, on the other hand, seemed to radiate with life and charisma, as though to make up for what he stole from his victims. "Better be a dealer or something, customers don't get much farther through the doors than the pussy they pay for."

"In that case, Duo, perhaps you'd better make something that looks impressive but won't turn Trowa into a junkie," Winner mused. "It'll give him an edge against the competition."

"Yeah, all right," and the necromancer lapsed into quiet thought, already focusing on his given task. Une carefully kept her expression neutral as the blond turned to her.

"We'll need some wires, of course. There's no way I'm sending Trowa in that kind of situation without a way to contact us. Heero can make them undetectable by any sensors or wards they might have up."

"Of course," Une agreed easily.

"Wufei, I'd like you to go with Trowa. If you're willing to put on a collar, then you can convince everyone you're his bodyguard and entirely off-limits."

A dragon's pride warred with one of the strictest ties of loyalty and possessiveness that existed among any of the Sphere's known races. Eventually Wufei sighed and said, "In the name of watching his back, yes, of course I'd be willing. Maxwell, make one crack about it and I'll string you up by your own intestines."

Purple eyes flashed with amusement, but he wisely kept his mouth shut. All the pilots knew that they would each do the same for another of their own anyway.

"Heero, I want you to keep an eye on their equipment and make sure none of them get tagged. The last thing we need is a mage messing up the wires or putting a curse on Trowa and Wufei. Duo, you're the most familiar with this kind of thing. Besides coming up with something for Trowa to substantiate his cover, do what you think is best, all right?"

"Aye-aye, Mister Boss Man."

Quatre's answering smile was at odds with the calculating edge of his eyes.

"What will you be doing, Winner?" Une asked, and received a rueful little laugh.

"I'm afraid that I'd stand out more than the others in this kind of environment. I'll be keeping tabs on all of them and running communications, but the second I step through the door everyone will know I'm, ah—"

"A high-bred noble who threw up on Persian rugs as a toddler," Maxwell provided cheerfully. When Winner rolled his eyes, the other pilot said, "Hey man, you can shoot and kill with the best of us, but there's no way in hell you're ever gonna get rid of the pansy-ass way you hold out a pinky when you sip your afternoon tea."

"…'Pansy-ass'?"

"Well, as pansy-ass as a Gundam pilot can be," Maxwell amended with an unapologetic grin. After all, it wasn't every day that one could find an empath capable of murder without hesitating to pull the trigger.

Yuy and Barton both came to stand behind the three seated pilots, the first leaning over Maxwell's shoulder to fix Une with the intensity of a lycanthrope's stare. The necromancer seemed to lean back into his presence without being aware of it; considering how jealously all five guarded their personal space, it was as intimate a gesture as anything else she'd seen. Une was once more struck by how they worked together as well as the internal gears of a single Gundam, and that it was little wonder OZ had lost the war to these five young men.

"Preventers will be funding this, of course." Yuy made what should have been a question sound more like a statement.

_The lengths we go to for politics._ "Of course."


	2. Death as a Picture

I'm sorry, I was unclear. This wasn't meant to be a single story, but rather a bunch of oneshots centered around a common idea – namely, Duo as a necromancer and the awesomeness thereof. I apologize for being misleading.

* * *

**Death as a Picture**_**  
Hades' Phoenix**_

_Once upon a time there lived a boy at the edge of the universe_.

xxx

When he'd first met the others, Duo hadn't exactly been in his right mind. He was better now that the war was over, now that he had a family of four to come home to each night that would keep him grounded in the mortal world.

Sometimes it was easy to forget that Death was more than just his name. It took a foolish, daring, passionate, wise soul to love Death, to look Him in the face and see your own mortality, the mortality of your species, and not have fear.

Or four souls.

xxx

Duo twined around his lovers with a purr of satiation. Heero and Trowa were prone to cuddling after sex, though they'd never admit it, as primal instinct demanded reassurance of their packmates' presence. Wufei would lay boneless and watch them all with liquid reptilian eyes. It was well known, on the other hand, that Quatre would remain a senseless puddle of puppyish happiness for some time as his empathy wrapped around the others and their emotions like a creeper vine on solid old stone.

Duo would whisper into the pillows, into the curve of someone's throat. The affirmation of life and sex made the others' shadows stronger for a time, turning the necromancer rather tipsy as their mortalities murmured to him. It was usually one of the lycanthropes that would hold him and provide a grounding reality for him to cling to.

xxx

Life wasn't made from things like blood and bone, genetics and physics and chemical combustion. It was made from stories.

xxx

"I don't understand!" the five-year-old boy cried, tears and snot streaking his face.

Seeing Sister Helen put a hand to her mouth with sick horror, Father Maxwell knelt on the floor just outside the circle drawn with salt and cinnabar. "I'm so sorry, child," he said softly, "but this is necessary, not just to protect other people but also to protect you."

"But I'm _scared!_" He trembled in the center of the circle, rattling the chains that held him down. Father Maxwell felt his heart breaking at the sight of the sobbing boy terrified by all the occultism without understanding why, unable to comprehend the consequences of the darkness that had taken hold of his own young soul.

"It will be all right," the Father murmured, unable to hide in his words the sorrow that was cold in his chest. "It's just a nightmare. Close your eyes and you'll wake up soon."

The nameless boy squeezed his eyes shut desperately. He could hear the Father saying something in that funny old language of his, underscored by the softer tones of the Sister. He wanted to trust them because they hadn't thought he smelled bad, and let him use a bed that didn't leave him lice-bitten in the morning, and gave him cookies that weren't even moldy –

But then he would see Solo's glazed dead eyes and the flies crawling over the corpse's open sores, blood spattering the asphalt as ragged children coughed up their lungs, adults refusing to come near the dead and dying orphans for fear of their own health, and the boy would be filled with such fury he thought it might spill out of him and kill everything it touched. The flies and the sores had never touched the boy's skin; instead they crawled inside and brought all the shadows with them.

(Every Romefeller soldier in the northern quarter of the colony died within a week. It was blamed on the rebels' guerilla tactics.)

The boy had his eyes closed so tightly he was beginning to develop a headache, but he could still see the shadows standing tall and dark behind the Father and Sister. The shadows spoke of fire from the sky and broken glass and pain; such pain as the kind that could only come from betrayal, from war, from bitter knowledge that suffering in life didn't make anyone noble and just made death seem a little more like a vengeful 'fuck you' to enemies that never got the chance to strike the killing blow themselves.

(It hadn't mattered that the adults let the little thieving brats die, in the end the tiny rotting bodies full of plague spread flies and sores as though the fear had served as lines of gunpowder for sulfurous matches. Disease had caught the scent of the grown-ups' fear-sweat and nipped at their heels until their bodies gave up and collapsed. Ashes to ashes.)

And as the Father's and the Sister's voices droned on the boy couldn't help his screaming.

"_E nomine padre, et filii, et spiritus sancti – tuo vocam Duo Maxwell!"_

When the last echoes of their combined voices died away, Sister Helen unceremoniously smudged the circle of salt as she dashed for the fallen boy. Father Maxwell was just behind her, heart breaking anew as the nun carefully lifted the boy (no, his name was Duo now) onto her lap.

Duo was trembling, but eerily silent, pressing his face against the curve of Sister Helen's neck as she stroked his braid and murmured, "Oh, my poor child, my poor little boy, it's all right…"

"The nightmare's over, Duo," said Father Maxwell quietly, "you can open your eyes now."

The otherworldly purple of the boy's eyes had dimmed to a more natural bluish shade; the ageless awareness in his gaze was gone, bound by the limitations of a proper mortal name. Duo looked like a child in every meaning of the word now, no longer a being of anger and terror and hate, and he peered timidly over the Sister's shoulder.

"No," he whispered, "this is just the deeper sleep before it comes back."

xxx

Death was both transient and absolute, making it a concept that appeared infinitely complicated to a mortal mind and yet was stunningly, cruelly, brilliantly simple. Of all the races that populated the Earth's Sphere, necromancers were the most unique in that no one knew how they were made. They weren't born, or bred; they couldn't be made by technological or magical means, despite some mad attempts to do exactly that; there existed no genetic explanation, as there were for empaths and pyrokinetics. But, somehow, they lived and breathed and existed the same as werewolves or the Dragon clans. They ate, and talked, and fucked, and dreamed the same ephemeral dreams. They felt pain, and joy.

But there were times in which Duo would go silent and forget to smile, and the other pilots suddenly felt that they were standing in the presence of something they'd known all their life without ever being consciously aware of it.

xxx

A person's death was as unique as the person himself.

xxx

Sex between Duo and Quatre could get rather…intense.

By nature empaths became either entirely withdrawn from the world, going cold in an attempt to protect themselves against the overwhelming sensations around them, or they became incredibly tactile as they instinctively reached out to soothe mental wounds. Quatre leaned towards the latter outside of battle, focusing his heart on the other pilots to maintain his sanity in a world of constantly shifting friendships and enmities, like clinging to the rocks in the midst of a storm-tossed ocean.

(Werewolves were renowned for their protectiveness of loved ones. At least until an empath was put in a bad situation, and suddenly the werewolves seemed more like overgrown puppies in comparison.)

To Quatre, Duo felt like a living contradiction, a brilliant light that cast shadows instead of illumination. He was something evanescent, hardly alive, barely even existing, and yet so undeniably _there _that the blond would never, ever mistake his presence for anyone (any_thing) else_. He was the personification of a principle that might come in a hundred million different shapes but still, inevitably, implacably, always comes for everyone, Quatre's rational side told him. And nature abhors a vacuum, so the empath couldn't help thrusting harder and harder into the body beneath him without ever quite being able to crawl inside Duo's skin, fingers tightening on hips until bruises formed, lips kissing until teeth drew blood.

To Duo, Quatre was a wellspring of life and emotion and _being_ that made his skin shiver, his toes curl, his back arch upwards to try and greedily pull all that light into himself like a collapsing star. Between the two of them was a careful dance of polar extremes, an ebb and flow guided by the single commonality of what it meant to be human.

When Wufei once walked in on them, he leaned against the doorjamb with a book dangling from one hand and an eyebrow rising above his thin glasses.

"If you two don't stop, you're going to mentally scar every psychic within five miles of this place."

Quatre just smiled, forehead pressed against Duo's sternum. Duo smirked with bloodstained lips, demonstratively stretching against the mattress and tightening his thighs around the other's hips. Both of their bodies bore welts from blunt fingernails, and shadows within the room were trembling and stretching towards the beds against all the laws of physics. One particularly ambitious shade wound around Wufei's leg with the sensation of a graveyard's chill. Instead of looking worn out from hours of carnal sin, the empath and the necromancer smelled to Wufei's senses like they were drunk on a spiritual high.

He sighed in exasperation. "At least keep yourselves from projecting onto the other existential planes, I have no particular wish to begin associating Sun Tzu with Duo yelling 'fuck me'."

Quatre muffled his snickering in Duo's chest.

xxx

Wufei didn't mind allowing Duo to read his books. He didn't bend the spine or curl the pages, and he replaced them on the shelf when he was done. That said, the dragon never could figure out why Duo had a habit of reading only two-thirds of a given book (usually some sort of fiction, he claimed Wufei's more scholarly subjects were as dry as an old mausoleum) before putting it away and starting another.

When he asked, there was a long pause, then a quiet, "I already know all the endings. Sometimes it's nice just to see the beginnings."

xxx

"Once upon a time there lived an old man at the edge of the universe," Duo began with a smile and a glint in his eye, "and every night when the galaxies set and the gods went to sleep, he stood at the edge and stared out into the void."

The children at his feet listened with wide eyes as he spun a tale of longing and memory. He didn't know himself where his talent for storytelling, for half-truths and verbalizing the wordless, came from. Maybe it was his life as a thief and terrorist, maybe it was because he saw a hundred different deaths every day. Personally he liked to think it was an innate creativity that didn't have anything to do with anything except himself, especially when it let him connect with these children on a level beyond what a jaded, narrow-minded adult could understand.

"In the void he could see something that might've been a dragon, might've been a snake – "

"A naga!" shrieked a giggling mage child, just before he was knocked over by an actual half-grown naga with a mean right hook. Duo hid a smile as Heero patiently sorted out the tussling kids with that quiet steel confidence of his.

_That's impossible_, adults would say about…anything, everything. _It goes against the laws of magic._ Laws! As though _magic _were something to be distilled, dissected, diluted. No, there were the _laws _of physics, and then there was magic to mess with those laws and keep them all on their philosophical toes.

When the little naga and mage were still and Heero once more standing behind Duo's shoulder, the necromancer continued speaking, weaving his hands in the air as though directing his own words, as though he could pull out all the intricacies of the human heart without magic and lay them down in blood and sepia ink. Ashes to ashes, _e nomine padre._

Wisps of shadows, unconsciously peeled from the dark side of air particles, trailed after his fingers.

xxx

When someone thinks they're going to die, time slows down until a heartbeat lasts for a millennium.

Like a proper orgasm, Duo said.

_La petite morte._

xxx

The understanding between Duo and Trowa was something of a more silent nature. Werewolves had a different relationship with death than empaths or even dragons, as they were a species that lived with wildness in their veins. Killing came as easily as fucking and hunting. The universe sang in the lycanthropic heart.

It was no coincidence that wolves and ravens had a symbiotic tradition.

So when the moon was full or simply when the tedium of daily mundane life got to be too much, Trowa would slip away to some region unpopulated for miles around. Duo would sometimes accompany him with a face as expressionless as a deathmask and eyes dark as stone.

_Ready to fly?_

The long, lean muscle of Trowa's body would twist and ripple like water as his bones snapped into new shapes: longer forelimbs, shortened digits, extended jaws that turned his face lupine. Duo could never look away from these transformations. Whereas he always witnessed the change from life to death, _this_ was like seeing the potential hidden underneath a shallow human exterior finally given breath and strength. It was the opposite of entropy; it was the creation of savage beauty and power.

The necromancer then inhaled the scent of fresh blood and a pounding heart, and laughed.

Trowa howled, long and low and surreal, before taking off through the expanse of forest with his paws ripping into the ground.

Duo had no such transformation himself, not a raven or other properly clichéd form. But everything has a death, even stones and dust particles – all he had to do was reach out for that darkness to flow like water after the werewolf. Under the odd flatness that moonlight cast onto the world, his vision would expand in a thousand different directions as a thousand different beings died or were destroyed. In these times he was no longer 'Duo Maxwell'; instead he had names like Azazel or Shinigami or Santa Muerte, _bean sídhe__ or simply 'the companion behind one's shoulder.'_

_Trowa howled again. Before the echoes could fade Duo called out as well, the sound (a death-rattle, a scream cut short, a last breath) rising on the wind and fading in the dark places between the stars._

xxx

_Once upon a time there lived a boy at the edge of the universe_.

xxx

Nowadays Heero was a bit more careful with his life, as the four other pilots – just as stubborn and tough as he was, albeit in different ways – had made it quite clear to him that they valued his life much more than his corpse. With the war over and Preventers managing to repress a few rebellions thus far, the promise to look both ways, so to speak, wasn't too difficult to keep.

But that was now. During the war, Duo hadn't been pleased when Heero tried to blow himself up. Again.

"_Do you __**want **__to die?" _Duo snarled, to which Heero had merely raised a brow.

"_Don't tell me you're afraid of death, Maxwell."_

The necromancer had seized Heero's tank-top and yanked him close enough that the werewolf could smell the odd musty sweetness of his breath.

"_I can see your death, Yuy. It follows your heels like a shadow. But if you think I'm going to sit back and watch you court it like a fucking suicide bomber, then __**I **__will be the one to show you what your death is. Sweet Baby fucking Jesus, you're so in love with your Goddamned ideals that you can't even live properly! So if you want to die so much, say the word and I'll finish the job I started."_

Their first meeting had healed as two messy graze-scars on Heero's upper arm.

Later, the werewolf mused that it was death itself that made the necromancer such a passionate fatalist. How could Duo be anything else, when he lived his life in the constant shadow of mortality? It might have destroyed a lesser soul. And perhaps that was what made necromancers; not birth or occult rituals, but a life-force so strong that it transcended the traditional boundaries between existence and annihilation.

The thought made Heero feel humbled, and from then on he lived with this philosophy: everything dies. Whether it was a creature or ideal, change, often in the form of death, was inevitable. Living that brief period as fully as he could was the best way to honor that brief period.

And the only way to love Death.

xxx

It took a foolish, daring, passionate, wise soul to love Death, to look Him in the face and see your own mortality, the mortality of your species, and not have fear.

Or four souls.

xxx

_Once upon a time there lived a boy at the edge of the universe, and from the abyss he pulled out the stories for Life._


	3. Those Who Burn

**Those Who Burn  
**_**Hades' Phoenix**_

Legend has it that when lightning strikes the sea, a single perfect pearl is formed.

…

"Aren't you even worried? I mean, they're taking our air!"

Wufei continued looking through the diagrams projected onto the wall by the small piece Barton had slipped to them, ignoring Maxwell's indignant restlessness. Secrets of the Dragon Clans were jealously guarded, and so the other pilot couldn't know that if Wufei allowed himself to get righteously angry, then his fire would grow hotter and burn the remaining oxygen that much faster.

"Stay calm and breathe shallowly," he retorted flatly.

"Calm? Excuse me if I'm a bit pissed off that these Ozzies can't even bother to kill us in person, Zen Boy."

_Breathe. Allow the world to move around and through you, even if it means listening to Maxwell._

"Have you ever heard 'revenge is a dish best served cold'?" Wufei murmured, and from the corner of his gaze he saw the necromancer's eyes narrow in interest. A thin smile curled his lips as he continued, "Instead of letting them hear your pain, imagine how you're going to pay them back in kind when we escape."

Something dark – not a shadow, but a twist of emotion – flickered across Maxwell's expression.

"Never thought I'd say this, but you're a man after my own heart, Chang."

…

Some believe that after five hundred years, the humble seahorse becomes a great dragon.

…

There was no one else in the small house as Wufei strode towards the dojo at the rear of the building, spine straight and hard as a steel rebar. Each one of the pilots had his own private place where the others didn't intrude. It was necessary, when five young soldiers all had their own set of quirks and reflexes that didn't do well in cramped spaces and could easily result in corpses. Wufei had found it wisest to have his own bolt-hole not far from Preventers HQ in Brussels.

"_You're telling me he's going to walk?"_

"_His lawyer managed to convince the judge that the evidence gathered at the crime scene was tainted, Chang_._ All we have to fall back on is circumstantial._"

Une had been just as unhappy about the circumstances, but was resigned. She knew bureaucracy, and so did Wufei, on an intellectual level. But that didn't stop him from snarling to himself as he threw open the door of the dojo.

"_The man's responsible for one of the most pervasive prostitution rings in the colonies!"_

"_He's also well-connected."_

The spring-board bamboo floor was comfortably familiar beneath the dragon's bare feet. Without ceremony he tore off his jacket and shirt, leaving on his trousers, and took a moment to let out a harsh breath through his nose. The air was cool against the scales that ran down his spine in intricate whorls.

"_This is bullshit!"_

"_What do you want me to say, Chang? You want me to order his assassination in the middle of the night? This isn't the war anymore! Unless you've decided to go vigilante, in which case you will hand over your Preventer badge, then there's nothing you can do!"_

Slowly he bent his legs and sank into a horse stance, keeping his spine straight, his center of balance low and as controlled as his breath. It was fire that ran through his blood and marrow, a small intense sun that drove him relentlessly forward, but now he calmed the inferno, coaxing it to smoldering coals. He needed focus, not drive; he needed the quiet at the eye of the storm.

Then he brought his fists to his sides, bending his elbows, and slowly pushed out as though pressing against a wall. Bent knees, solid balance, slow controlled movement.

(He wanted the criminal's flesh beneath his claws.)

When his breaths no longer came out as soft snarls, he stepped forward into the first _ch'uan_. His footing was sure and his muscles coiled and relaxed in ways as familiar to him as walking. His eyes were half-lidded as he turned his attention simultaneously inward and out, smoothing the tangled _chi _in his body while being sharply aware of every movement, every whisper of skin against wood or cloth.

(He wanted to tear that flesh from the criminal's bones.)

"_I know you don't like this. I don't either, and I – well. Sometimes I wish things were different. But this is the way our world works. All we can do is bring the criminals in and hope that justice is meted out."_

"_And if it isn't?"_

Une hadn't been able to give him an answer to that.

Wufei wasn't stupid, was in fact one of the best at detective work in the Preventers agency. He'd always known the world wasn't fair – hell, there was a time before Meiran died and his colony self-destructed in which he would have argued that 'justice' was just as fleeting and naïve an ideal as any other. Such was the arrogance of his philosophic learning, just as far removed from practicality as the very ideals it criticized.

_Embrace the tiger_, a distant part of his mind commented as he slid smoothly into the movement.

(A man who sold adults and children of both sexes, of all races, into sexual slavery was walking around _unpunished_.)

There were two choices. Either Wufei could hold his tongue against such a blatant breach of justice and continue hunting; or he could hunt this one bastard down himself, which would turn him against official law and make sure that this was his _last _hunt. Unfortunately, as one of the five best, he was often sent in to handle the worst cases of sabotage, rape, murder, and sadism. Sacrifice the future to bring down this one rabid beast, or sacrifice his own principles this time so that he could uphold them in the future.

The warrior versus the scholar.

Action versus inaction.

It wasn't until Wufei put a fist through the wall that he realized the fire in his blood was screaming at the universe.

…

The other pilots had an odd fascination for Wufei's skin.

As mammals, the four young men were used to certain things about living bodies. Heat, for one, usually present in equal proportions throughout the torso and extremities. The unique sensation of skin. A covering of hair in varying degrees of thickness across most of that expanse.

But Wufei had a soft, fine, hairless hide, composed of scales so small that it took careful scrutiny to realize that the patterning wasn't the normal wrinkling and printing of mammalian skin at all. The scales were slightly larger on the backs of his hands, shoulders, and particularly his spine, where they were nearly the size of coins. The dragon was cool to the touch on his limbs, but got warmer towards the center of his torso. The area just above his heart was as hot as the covering for a furnace.

_Like silk_, Quatre once said as his fingers followed the subtle swirls of scales across Wufei's torso. The scales were chill to his first touch, but they would quickly absorb warmth from his fingers, just like fabric. (One didn't need empathy to know that the dragon wasn't very fond of that comparison.)

_Like shadows_, Duo contradicted, chest pressed against Wufei's back as he unhesitatingly did his own exploring. The scales were more three-dimensional than skin, catching and dully reflecting dim light like burnished metal. If empaths were the emotional foil for necromancers, then dragons embodied the passion that pushed even the humblest of creatures to cling to life.

Neither of the werewolves had ever offered an opinion, but then, they didn't need to. Werewolves constantly straddled the line between order and wildness, just as dragons did. One species wore its wildness as a skin under the moon and the other carried it between its ribs like a sun. Clashes between the two were enough to make the heavens tremble. No, the wolves were more interested in the dry, musky, reptilian scent so different from their own earthiness – just as dangerous, just as wild.

Wufei, in turn, was both fascinated and unsettled by the thin skins of the others, particularly in the beginning of their odd living arrangement. Seven paper-thin cutaneous layers holding muscle and bone together, so easily broken and bruised that he tended to be overly cautious when his hard nails or needle-sharp fangs got anywhere close. Wufei had to straddle the precarious balance between passion and self-control.

He didn't like to think about the few times he'd lost sight of himself and ended up with a lover's blood on his hands or lips. Not that any of the other pilots blamed him, or indeed weren't used to more severe injuries, and seemed to take his loss of control as a victory instead of indication of weakness on his part.

…

It was said that a dragon's heart burned like fire.

What Wufei never told the other pilots was that one day, in the way of all dragons, the fire would eventually consume him.

…

Even though the collar was a perfect fit, its presence was like a noose around his throat. Wufei made sure to keep his breathing steady, ruthlessly holding down the instincts that wanted to _kill_ the one who dared thought he could collar a _dragon_ –

Trowa watched him carefully and kept his own body language as unthreatening as possible. Lupine strength or not, even he wouldn't be able to stop a dragon snapped into full fury. When Wufei finally gave him a tight nod in the mirror, Trowa finished the last tie of the collar and then rested his fingers unthreateningly on the other's shoulders.

It was a simple band of black leather, slimmer than the width of two fingers. Even so, only the knowledge that this was _Trowa _who had put it on him and that Wufei given his permission kept the dragon from transforming into the five-clawed terror of his clan. Quite honestly, Trowa was probably the only person he could have allowed to do this; Heero was too much of a rival for something as delicate as this, and Duo and Quatre would've probably betrayed some kind of emotion that Wufei wouldn't have been able to tolerate. But Trowa was just as controlled a person as Wufei, in his own way, and was worldly enough to understand the implications of what it meant for a dragon to wear a fucking _collar._

Wufei stared at his reflection in the full-length mirror. He'd agreed to the slightly padded leather trousers with little more than a grumble – the colonies, especially L2, tended to be colder than Earth's climes, and the trousers were loose and tough enough to be worthy of battle. His shirt was a plain, dark-red tank top that would be covered by one of Duo's battered leather coats. And then the collar, standing out against the coppery tone of his hide.

"_Hey Wufei, what would you say if I said I wanted to tie you down during sex?"_

"_I'd say that you had a death wish."_

"_What, no sense of adventure?"_

"…_Maxwell, if I'm going to let you fuck me, it's going to be because you earned my submission. Tie me down and you won't live long enough to take advantage of it."_

"People are going to comment," Trowa said quietly, meeting his eyes in the mirror's reflection. Wufei knew the other pilot well enough to understand that it was a gentle question: could he handle being silent in the face of crude innuendo and potential humiliation?

"Of course they will." The fact that Trowa would be walking into a room with a dragon as his bodyguard would instantly raise everyone's estimation of the werewolf. Of course there would be comments…and whispers, and leers, and condescension.

But if Wufei wasn't careful with this mission, then the man that had slipped through the Preventers' hands before would escape once more…and he could also very well get one or more of his lovers killed. Both possibilities were horrifying.

He met Trowa's gaze in the mirror and found no judgment, no expectation, simply acceptance for what might or might not happen. Somehow it helped to settle the insecurity in his heart; one way or another, fate would take its course.

…

Quatre would never admit it, but the emotions he sensed from Wufei could be as unpredictable and uncontrolled as a wildfire or some of the bombs Duo was often sent in by Preventers to defuse. And like one of those threatening bombs, defusing such a temperament all depended on timing.

If Quatre caught the dragon in the study, reclining on a couch with a book or with an inkbrush in hand, it would be like feeling gentle warmth on his face, the kind that came from a fireplace and soothed wintry chills at the end of a long day. More than once the empath had found himself drawn from his own work to wander into whatever room Wufei happened to be occupying just to savor the calm, receptive, meditative mood, sometimes to sit in silent company or to be drawn into some debate about whatever had caught Wufei's scholarly interest.

If Quatre caught him in the backyard training, it would be the sharp, focused heat of sunlight on metal. It was a different kind of calm, a battle-minded one that appealed to the fighter and strategist in himself.

But if Quatre caught Wufei coming back from a meeting with Une or a particularly ignorant politician, or after a fight with one of the other pilots, or just when he was generally feeling angry and disillusioned, the emotions hit the blond in the face like a wave of flame and ash. It was the sheer _power_ of that internal firestorm that always took his breath away, the depth of passion, willpower, and drive that fueled it. It made it nearly impossible to get through to Wufei when he turned that fire on himself, but when it turned outwards onto an enemy…

It was like witnessing the breathtaking power of a hurricane, and when that happened Quatre could swear he fell just a little more in love each time.

…

Dragons are present in the mythologies of a wide variety of cultures, and in every case their strength is emphasized: strength of honor or strength of evil, physical power or spiritual.

And every dragon has something it fights for.

…

When Wufei and Heero sparred, they sparred _seriously_. Duo had once watched with a bowl of popcorn in his lap, intending to mock them with it, and ended up not eating any because he was gaping like a fish. It wasn't like mobile suit battles allowed much room for hand-to-hand combat, and the few times that the pilots were paired up with one another there was usually too much running and shooting to really observe each other's fighting abilities.

And _damn _could those two take pieces out of each other.

Transformed, Heero had a thick brown pelt that made his lean body look both larger and more dangerous. Black lips pulled back in a snarl over ivory teeth that could easily snap bone – and had, when he'd run out of bullets.

Dragons of Wufei's breed could change their size at will, but against Heero Wufei's serpentine body was several meters long and as thick as an anaconda, four-limbed and wingless and brilliant as a newly minted penny. His long whiskers and dorsal spines were as dark as his eyes, as dark as stone. It was a good thing that the pilots' shared home was a fair ways outside of the city; that way no one could complain about the eerie howls of a werewolf or the thunderous roars of a dragon as they did their best to tear each other apart.

All in the name of self-improvement, of course.

…

Comparison to a dragon is considered the height of praise and honor.

…

Duo had a bone to pick with the world. Well, more like some of the less polite OZ soldiers, but he would be more than happy to share the tough love. His annoyance had to do with the concept of 'masculine beauty' and the strange interpretations it was often subject to.

For instance, long hair, or what resembled long hair among the more diverse species of the Earth's Sphere. When he had Wufei underneath him and the dragon looked up with hooded eyes, unbound hair lying in a tangle on the pillow and over his bronze-skinned shoulders, the necromancer saw absolutely nothing feminine. There was no mistaking the breadth of the dragon's shoulders, the narrowness of the waist he gripped, or the hard cock between their stomachs.

Then there was the whole submission thing and the implication that being the one on his back indicated some kind of inferiority. The thought was ridiculous when Duo felt his movements being guided by the powerful legs that wrapped around his hips, and when it takes two to tango – well, _someone_ has to be one catching, so to speak, otherwise it was an exercise in futility. Duo was one tough little bastard, but he well knew that in a straight mano-a-mano fight with Wufei, he'd get his ass handed back to him within seconds.

And Duo hadn't actuallywanted to tie the dragon up. He preferred a bit of interaction himself, thank you, as well as the knowledge that his lover stayed in the action because he damn well _wanted _to. But Christ strike him dead if Wufei's reaction to the suggestion hadn't been hilarious; and even now, flat on his back with his legs spread and another man fucking him, Wufei's dark eyes were more inscrutable than ever, the slight curl in his lips seeming to murmur, _Is that all you've got?_

Then the necromancer would bare his teeth in a dark smile and think, _Sweetheart, I haven't even gotten started_.

Now, the dragon could be a bit of an ass when it came to women and equality, but Duo would be one of the first to admit that the women _he _knew could be pretty fucking scary and would put several bullets into the skull of anyone who suggested they each needed a man to set them straight. Hell, when one thought about it, two women were leading the post-war world in both peace politics and peace-keeping and doing a damn good job in the process. Besides, Duo could sympathize with the fairer sex, considering how often his ass-length braid had gotten him mistaken for a girl or a defenseless faggot boytoy.

But there was nothing _feminine _about this, about the way trained muscle flexed under the cool silkiness of Wufei's hide or the efficient way he could flip their positions without Duo ever sliding out of him. Wufei mindfully kept his claws away from the other's chest as he languidly rolled his hips, testing both of their control – and if there was anything about Wufei that had surprised the other pilots, it was the way he approached sex with the same single-minded focus he bestowed upon everything else. And he'd done so with his usual blunt arrogance.

_What about my body do I have to be ashamed of?_

What, indeed. Of course, Duo had been obliged to respond with, _Except for that little lack in the party department that Asian men seem to suffer from_, and for which Wufei had made certain that Duo's stride had been a bit stiff for a day or two.

Wufei had hands that in a more peaceful lifetime could have been a musician's, a scholar's, a painter's, but in this timeline they were callused and thick-knuckled from years of intense training. His nose was too straight and strong to be considered conventionally beautiful, and while his smiles could be breathtaking, they happened too rarely to soften the harshness of his features. His body was a disciplined weapon, but like any experienced weapon it bore the scars of past battles.

The necromancer followed the lines of scars with his fingertips, unconsciously cataloguing them as _shrapnel _or _bullet graze_ and loving their feel, loving that each one had their own little story to enhance Wufei's. And as though Wufei had sensed the other's wandering thoughts, he suddenly stopped moving and tightened his thighs to hold Duo's hips still. _Bastard_, Duo murmured, and the dragon just arched a brow in response.

…

It was rare for more than two pilots to be at their shared home at the same time. They might have decided to share their lives after the war, but they were solo soldiers by force of habit and their identities were ESUN's best-kept secret. Inevitably the majority of their small number would be abroad, acting as Preventers or diplomats or perhaps just sinking into the anonymity of being a clown or salvager.

More often they'd be paired up on missions, and this was where their respective personalities best meshed. This was when Wufei's doubts about their collective lifestyle decision were put to rest with the proof that there really was no one else best suited to a Gundam pilot than another Gundam pilot.

Maxwell had spent over three months hunting down old contacts, spreading whispered rumors and putting the finishing touches on his own special brand of narcotic. It had been taken from an abandoned Romefeller project – only the Jade Emperor knew why those aristocrats had been so obsessed with biological warfare anyway – and then twisted by the Deathscythe pilot along with Preventers' doctors to produce something impressive but non-lethal. It would now be time for Wufei and Trowa to begin their own roles and slowly work their way into the underground of L2-X0843, and though it would many more months of tedious maneuvering and self-control…

Well, perhaps it was a good thing that not all criminals were as intelligent as the pilots' targets.

It had started with an offhand insult from Trowa's false identity in a bar and led to a shoot-out between the two pilots and a small-time gang only loosely associated with the prostitution ring. Trowa was pinned behind a stack of crates in the warehouse, unable to shoot back without exposing himself.

Wufei didn't even spare the energy for a vicious smile. Without hesitation he threw himself over the third-floor catwalk of the warehouse and landed in a crouch among the group of criminals, then sprung back up to his feet and knocked the gun from the closest man's hand within a few seconds. A blow to the solar plexus sent the now-unarmed man to the ground. Another man was put out with an efficiently snapped neck, a third dead from a blow that smashed his nose and drove the bone back into his skull. The fourth took a bullet to the forehead from Trowa; the fifth and last man, a mage of some kind and therefore a coward in Wufei's eyes, took off in terrified flight for the door.

The dragon let him go. Stories would spread of the werewolf and the dragon who were far from being either naïve or overconfident in wanting to play with the big names, and they would be that much closer in reaching their goal.

Trowa was binding the hands of the first man before going through the clothes on the three corpses. Wufei went to help him, but a small voice whispered in the back of his head through a telepathy spell.

_You missed one, _Quatre murmured. Distantly he could feel Duo's amusement and Heero's wry snort.

Wufei replied with the sensation of haughty arrogance, and looked up at Trowa with a smirk. He received a thin, mysterious smile in return.


End file.
